"Milly," he said, in the tone he always had toward her at her worst, a tone of recalling her, bidding her remember she was a nice ordinary woman, not an arbiter of social destinies, "Milly, sometimes you're an awful idiot. Don't you know you are? Don't you see it won't do to keep hitting me on the raw? I sha'n't stand it, you know. I shall have to take Nan under my arm and get out and leave you the house to yourself. It's all very well for you to call down alienists on me, and get me to put myself under restraint, but Nan's rather sacred to me. You can't meddle with Nan, and if you weren't so wrapped up in your own conceit, you'd see you couldn't." Amelia seemed to be reflecting on something which resulted in shocking her into a further uneasiness. "And the thing she said! I heard it with my own ears. She adored you! That's what she said, adored you. To Dick, too, of all people, Dick she's virtually engaged to." Raven remembered a scene in a play where a drunken man lifts a chair and then, aware of his own possibilities, gently sets it down again. He wanted to lift a chair. Only he wanted to complete the act and smash it. "Milly," he said gently, "I tell you Nan is a child. Doesn't that show she's a child--the pretty extravagance of it! Why, I'm 'old Rookie' to Nan. What else do you think I could possibly be?" "Heaven knows," said Amelia, tightening her lips. "I can't imagine what her Aunt Anne would have said. John, wasn't it wonderful her leaving you practically all her money? And just what might have been expected. She was bound up in you." "O Lord!" said Raven. But Amelia, once started, knew no bounds. "And that's what I say, John. If you take hold of yourself now and get into shape again, you've a great many years before you, and Anne's money with yours--well, I don't see why you shouldn't look forward to a great deal." Raven went over to the window and sat down there staring at the black bare branches and the clear sky. It seemed to him unspeakably desolate and even, in its indifference to his own mood, cruel. So was Amelia, he thought. In spite of her platitudes about enjoying a great deal, she had him dead and buried. He became absurdly conscious that he was afraid, but of one thing only: to hear her voice again. Upon that, thinking how it would actually sound, he turned about and ignominiously left the room. And since there was no spot in the house where she might not follow him he took his hat and jacket from the kitchen and went out through the shed. Charlotte was washing dishes at the sink, but she did not, according to her custom, look up to pass the time of day. A cloud rested even on her brown hair and splendid shoulders. Amelia had brought the cloud. She'd have to get out, even if he had to tell her so.